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Sunday, August 03, 2008

Double Bills

The new issue of Sight & Sound has a fun feature on double bills. (Here's the pdf.) A number of writers propose their own, for example:

Geoff Andrew -- Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg and Terence Davies' Of Time and the City, along with Victor Erice's short film La Morte Rouge. All 'city films'.

Michael Atkinson -- William Klein's Mr. Freedom and Trey Parker's Team America: World Police. ("The two most merciless, sophomoric films ever, made 35 years apart but during identically idiotic imperialist wars.")

Ian Christie -- Ken Jacobs' Tom Tom The Piper's Son and Douglas Sirk's Imitation Of Life.

Mark Cousins -- Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Gods Of The Plague and Djibril Diop Mambety's Hyenas. ("in the spirit of surrealism and the chance encounter, and because I think there are affinities between the directors I don't quite understand.")

Chris Darke -- Chris Petit's Radio On and Bruce Robinson's Withnail & I. ("One film sings, the other doesn't--Petit can't get a word in over Robinson's gargling.")

Maria Delgado -- Juan Antonio Bardem's Main Street and Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men. ("Both films offer a brilliant commentary on the sadistic excesses of a competitive culture that fails to respect ethical boundaries.")

Charlotte Garson -- David O. Russell's I ♥ Huckabees and Jean-Luc Godard's Two Or Three Things I Know About Her. ("focusing alternately on the face and on the landscape, with the same mania for transforming ideas into objects.")

Mark Le Fanu -- Elan Kolirin's The Band's Visit and Ivan Passer's Intimate Lighting. ("Some of the best and most endurable films turn out to be those little 'unambitious' comedies that nonetheless capture the hopes and disappointments of ordinary life with miraculous accuracy.")

Kim Newman -- Peter Sykes' Demons of the Mind and Jim O'Connolly's Tower of Evil. ("Part of the surreal wonder of 1970s British horror was the use of well-spoken actors we knew from bland TV sitcoms and adventure shows in demented settings.")

James Quandt -- Frank Borzage's Three Comrades and Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale. ("Both are wartime accounts of a trio of friends whose lives are transformed by a fourth figure.")

Jonathan Rosenbaum -- Gordon Douglas' The Iron Mistress and Fritz Lang's Clash By Night. ("[S]ometimes, from a business angle, one film becomes the hook to lure audiences to see another. In my Friday evening film series at college, I once showed The Wild One (1953) + Orphée, two motorcycle movies, back to back with that rationale.")

Brad Stevens -- David Lynch's Inland Empire and Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating. (""Nothing analyses a film better than another film," wrote French critic Nicole Brenez.")

David Thomson -- Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped and Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel. ("[M]y favourite double bills are secret, thematic pairings, films where deep below the surface one picture is speaking to another.")

Noel Vera -- Ishmael Bernal's At the Top and Mario O'Hara's Woman on a Tin Roof. ("a pair of lovely bookends for the dawning and passing of an era.")

They're both, in a way, 'masala movies' that combine many flavors--drama, adventure, comedy, and pathos. They're both mythic tales: Biblical in the Ford, secular-nationalist in the Desai.

In the Ford film, three men (including John Wayne) find the course of their lives drastically changed when they unexpectedly take on godfatherly (actually, step-motherly) duties for a baby. In the Desai film, three boys are abandoned by their father under a statue of Mahatma Gandhi (!), and get separated. They are then discovered, adopted, and raised in, respectively, Hindu, Muslim and Christian families; thus their names and the name of the film.

And now, your turn: one (or more) double bill(s) you might program if you had the chance?

In 1974, when I was eleven years old, I skipped Juggernaut because it looked to me like a bad Poseidon Adventure rip-off. Boy, was I wrong. When I finally saw it in college, I found this film about a terrorist who plants a bomb on an ocean liner to be positively gripping. Richard Harris plays the bomb disposal expert.

Many years later still, I saw The Small Back Room – about a bomb disposal squad in WWII – and only then realized that Lester’s film is something of an homage. Though Juggernaut was apparently inspired by a real life event, it references the Powell/Pressburger film in a variety of specific details. I haven’t read anything that makes this link between the two films – though admittedly, I haven’t scoured the literature.

I won’t give away too much, but one of my favorite bits in Juggernaut is the uncredited appearance of Cyril Cusack, who was also a member of the disposal squad in Small Back Room. We are left to imagine him as the same character, and to imagine the life-time of off-screen events that led him from the first film to the second.

I'll second Chris's double bill-- Juggernaut uses RIchard Lester's fascination with cartoonish performance (that's a compliment) and the Rube Goldberg-like mechanics of gadgetry and filmmaking very well, and The Small Back Room is simply one of P&P's best movies, a tight, Le Carre-ish thriller that's unlike any of their other 40s work.

Girish, sorry to go off topic, but knowing of your interest in Robert Ray's work, I wanted to mention a new volume out from Parlor Press Called NEW MEDIA/NEW METHODS, which includes a Ray essay on the future of film scholarship. Here's the link:

Christian: Don't feel bad about dismissing Juggernaut at age 11. Had I been a more developed cinephile at that age I wouldn't have missed two real life double features - Man who Shot Liberty Valance with Hell is for Heroes. and The Naked Spur with Trapeze.

Carnival of Souls b/w Yella might seem indecent at first, but I actually think Petzold's film is more resonant, the earlier you recognize the armature it's built on -- in fact, I think recognizing it is actually the point.

As opposed to La Jetée b/w Spider Forest, which would just be cruel to the audience (even if Song does tip his hand early with a shot that's just a little too familiar in the airport scene.

One that pops to mind is Lee Chang-dong's PEEPERMINT CANDY with MEMENTO: two examples of reverse chronology filsm used to very different effects and within distinct national contexts.

One thing I like is when you see two films in a short period of time that unexpectedly illuminate each other and make me think of connections and ideas you wouldn't have had otherwise. A recent example of this for me was ATONEMENT and MARGOT AT THE WEDDING.

This probably isn't really in the spirit of the exercise, but how about pairings which illuminate the brilliance of one film at the expense of the other? I was thinking about Robin Wood's discussion of how clear Rio Bravo's greatness is in the light of High Noon's failures. Personally, I'm convinced that Hou's Flight of the Red Balloon gloriously succeeds in ways that are closely related to the dreadfulness of Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering, but I'd probably need a double-bill to sort out in my head what those relationships actually are!

I think I know what you mean, this springs to mind the default double bill of Lee Kang-Shang's The Missing and Tsai's Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Both films of which play so heavily on delays, and refrains, yet only Goodbye really succeeds; or at least makes it entertaining.

I saw Lee's Help Me, Eros last night, and it seems that they've inadvertently repeated the pairing. Not only was it another poor film, it also won't get far from escaping comparisons with The Wayward Cloud, which I think most would agree is far better.

"That means loving not only its accomplishments but its potential, its promise and prospects. It’s as if individual films, delectable and overpowering as they can be, are but glimpses of something far grander. That distant horizon, impossible to describe fully, is Cinema, and it is this art form, or medium, that is the ultimate object of devotion. In the darkening auditorium there ignites the hope of another view of that mysterious realm. The pious will call Cinema a holy place, the secular will see it as the treasure-house of an artform still capable of great things. The promised land of cinema, as experimentalists of the 1920s called it: that, mystical as it sounds, is my sense of what the cinephile yearns for.

"This separates the cinephile from the lover of novels or classical music. They love their art, I suspect, because of its great accomplishments. Who with literary or musical taste would embrace the subpar novel or the apprentice toccata? But cinephiles will watch damn near anything looking for a moment’s worth of magic. Perhaps this puts cinephiles closer to theatre buffs. They too wait hopefully for the sublime instant that flickers out of amateur performances of Our Town and Man and Superman.

"That’s also why I think that the cinephile finds the desert-island question so hard to answer. What movies would I want to live with for the rest of my life? All of them, especially the ones I haven’t yet seen."

Another one, this one so obvious that I can't believe I didn't think of it earlier: Jacques Tati's Play Time and Steven Spielberg's The Terminal, the latter of which consciously riffs on the former, even though it does in a much more circumscribed space.

Actually, that's something I keep wanting to write a (short) essay on. Both are melodramas about drunks and delinquents reconfigured so the melodrama is all in the back stories, and what is foregrounded instead is a bunch of people hanging out in a shared space and makeshift community, drinking, talking, and in extended scenes in each film (completely superfluous to the narrative, key to the portraiture), sitting around and singing songs together.

What's really fascinating to me is the obsession in each movie on doors (Hawks opens with one opening; Mizoguchi closes with one not closing). Characters in each try to lock themselves up in some safe, private community, away from public compromises (where every "good" character in each risks severe humiliation). But only in the Hawks do the doors really close; it's a fantasy, if a somewhat strange one, in which the characters have to lock themselves up from the public realm into order to protect it. Mizoguchi goes for Realism (with capital "R"): the doors don't shut and there is no sense of privacy (his own brand), so that constantly people are eavesdropping and spying, like a Kafka story, in which it's impossible to ultimately distinguish between public and private, and as a result, everyone is humiliated and compromised.

Looking at it this way, Street of Shame could just as well match with Good Men, Good Women or Flight of the Red Balloon. Might be my favorite Mizoguchi, actually (nobody else's). The Masters of Cinema DVD is a bit glossy and flat, but only because it's spic and span--well worth watching.

This is a fun topic - there are so many ways to look at it. Films that illuminate each other or contradict each other or complete each other, etc... And either ideas for what would be a good match or thinking about actual double bills you've seen - either real double features or just interesting back to back viewings: like seeing Planet of the Apes and Make Way for Tomorrow the same day... which makes me think of a recent pair of films that I think would make a good double bill: Up the Yangtze and Operation Filmmaker - documentaries about uprooted young people...

Anyway - I also wanted to note that Brad Stevens' pairing of Rivette and Lynch is particularly inspiring. I thought I'd posted something about their connections, but I couldn't find it anywhere - though I found the post just now half written, and never posted... it seems to me there's a real connection there - Mulholland Drive, especially, seems to borrow quite a bit from the Celine and Julie, but both films (the last two Lynch's) seem to be inspired by Rivette...

I love the drama and pathos and unintentional humor of the blood transfusion scene--and how many films can boast of such a scene?

Throw in another double bill--Wanted, that recent adaptation from a graphic novel of a hit man after a target with unintended results, and Mario O'Hara's Bagong Hari (The New King, 1986), about pretty much the same story (the target's identity turns out to be similiar, too). Fascinating to see the contrast betewen a generic Hollywood action flick full of strobelike editing, shaky cam and CGI effects, and a more classically composed action film (Bagong Hari's as if John Ford shot an action noir in Manila).

How about Lav Diaz's Batang Westside (West Side Avenue, 2001) and Death in the Land of Encantos (2007). The former examines being strangers in a foreign land, the latter examines being a stranger in your homeland, all in the context of death, the death of a drug user in the former and the deaths of the victims of a typhoon in the latter. Also, that double bill would roughly be around 14 hours. Fun times!

Alexandrov's Jolly Fellows (it has about thirteen alternate titles) and Demy's Demoiselles de Rochefort. Both films leave you with a grin that hurts your cheek, both see the musical as a constant state of being, and both see music as a way of making sense of the world and of resisting to anything that's wrong (something common to all musicals I guess, but here it's made into a philosophy and a conscious position more than in most). And the Alexandrov has the greatest ten opening minutes of any musical I've ever seen, and which are among the greatest film openings I can think of in any genre (the rest is also fantastic but not quite better than perfect, so the Alexandrov would have to be shown first to maximize the impact). I guess this is a double bill where the energy comes from two features reinforcing each other by being similar (though it's interesting to see the diffferences) rather than completing or being in contrast to each other. But it's also a double feature that shows a way of including choreographies other than the classical Hollywood/Broadway solution. Anyway, huge fun

Oh, and since we're on the subject of musicals, anyone know a good spot for arabic/indian/chinese musicals? I unearthed a Positif from a couple of years ago with a dossier on oriental musicals which hugely grabbed my interest (Maoist musicals from the Cultural Revolution, come on!), but apart from what they recommend themselves (a french book on the arabic musical that I haven't found except second-hand and ridiculously expensive on amazon) so far I haven't managed to find out more. Again, it seems so many people come here that it's worth putting in a little prayer...Nathan

When I programmed a Straub-Huillet retrospective in New York in 1982, this included some pairings and groupings of Straub-Huillet films with films by other filmmakers that they selected. Perhaps the most inspired of these was "Othon" + "Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice" + "A King in New York"--the logic of which becomes apparent if one recalls that the Chaplin film starts with a revolution!

Noel, that blood transfusion scene from Amar Akbar Anthony has to be one the most wonderful and absurdly touching scenes in all Indian popular cinema. (And for added effect, Desai slaps the opening credits over it, even though it comes a half-hour into the film--we could almost be watching an Apichatpong movie!).

Nathan, since nearly all Indian popular films are musicals in one sense, a terrific viewing companion might be Rachel Dwyer's BFI Screen Guide to Bollywood that has write-ups on 100 key films. I would argue with none of the titles on her list. Her write-ups are quite good too.

Corey Creekmur, who teaches at U/Iowa and writes (among other subjects) about Indian cinema, reminds me that Philip Lutgendorf's site (it's terrific) has a good write-up on Amar Akbar Anthony that includes several pictures including one of the statue of Mahatma Gandhi.

I did see Ariel Ureta playing the Man of Steel (in an omnibus film directed by Joey Gosiengfiao and Ishmael Bernal called Zoom, Zoom, Superman!. I was all of...seven years old at the time, and remember enjoying it immensely. Superman battling, if I remember right, a robot whose body resembled a huge biscuit tin.

Girish, great post. Double features have got to be one of the best mind exercises and then experiences (when the double feature is actually watched) around. I've been meaning to comment but have been too lazy. Recently I posted a double feature idea I inadvertently created, La Chinoise & The Weather Underground, which I highly recommend.

The Sight & Sound list is rather telling. Many of the choices are rather pedestrian, as choices go (even though the the films are often excellent). Even though many of the pairings would make a great evening of movie watching, I can't help but think that The Searchers and Rio Bravo (both films I love) is a rather too obvious choice, and not a choice one needs a film critic to create. But others are just brilliant, for example Duck Soup and Battle of Algiers, or Inland Empire and Céline et Julie vont en bateau. When I think of the purpose of double features it includes the idea of a good evening of movie watching, but it also includes the idea of creating something greater than the sum of its parts, as well as something unexpected and mind engaging. Finding pairings that one would not have otherwise considered is one of the best uses of the double feature exhibition genre.

Saw the Scarlet Empress yesterday and thought of pairing it up with... L'Année Dernière à Marienbad. What got me ticking was the tension, common to both films, between statues and human beings. In Sternerg, it's exteriorized and the statues are real, contrasted to the naive innocence of Marlene's movements and overwhelming her. That the camera chooses to follow her around in dollies only accentuates the looming presence of the gargoyles.In Marienbad, you get a bunch of human statues, slowly getting more and more petrified, with love as the only antidote (rather like in Sternberg). But in the Scarlet Empress, the final sequence does away with statues, ending in a whirlwind of movement that's a liberating seizing of power. In Marienbad, no such luck. The camera can still move freely (though still menacingly, cf the dolly-forward-fade to white rape) but no euphoria is allowed. Maybe that's what's scary about the film: whatever the feeling expressed (love, playful seduction or perverse domination), the flipside of it must be terror.

Haven't seen Marienbad in a while so I might be wrong, but I was reminded of it and played the contrast game throughout my viewing of the Sternberg.

My friend Cleber Eduardo programs a festival done all in double bills, a new brazilian film fallowed by an old one and then a discussion. Some of his choices do a great job at giving perspective to some of the new films and it's very useful here in Brazil when official discourse often makes it sound like there's nothing done here outside of a few official classics before 1990.

As for a double bill let me cheat a little and suggest one between Julio Bressane's Memories of a Blonde Strangler and Caetano Veloso's album A Little More Blue, both angry and homesick works by brazilian artists living in exile in London at 1971.

I also love when festivals create accidental double bills, both when they are unusual (The Son's Room/Ghosts of Mars in 2001 São Paulo) or just flow perfect into each other (Gianikian/Ricci Luchi's Ghiro Ghiro Tondo, Guerin's Unas Fotos en La Ciudad de sylvia and Giavito's Profit Motive at this year's Buenos Aires).

Hotel du Nord and Trouble in Mind, both of which weave tight, quirky melodramas around the habitues of small establishments (Trouble was renamed Wanda Cafe abroad)."You know why I opened an early morning cafe? Because you can't pick a better time of day... to watch the sun rise."

late to the game here, but this is one of my favorites to play. first, though, I'd like to say that Inland Empire + Celine and Julie Go Boating is an excellent one.

Bela Tarr's Satantango, followed by Pedro Costa's In Vanda's Room.

two films about the eternal presence of the past:John Gianvito’s Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, followed by Jean-Luc Godard’s Eloge de l’amour.

the What is Capitalism? Double Feature:Class Relations (Straub/Huillet) followed by Wall Street (Oliver Stone)

Rivette's Don't Touch the Axe (aka The Duchess of Langelais) followed by Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha Ha (the romantic trajectories of these films, and the moments of recognition that end them, are secretly very similar).

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